Altar Stone spectacular -- more nonsense from the BBC

Here we go again -- yet more sloppy journalism from the BBC. This time we can blame BBC Wales and a gullible reporter called James McCarthy for swallowing a dodgy press release about the Altar Stone.  They are about a month later than everybody else in covering this "story", but maybe they just needed something to fill up their local news reporting quota.........

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-67140221

The story is of course absurd, but the headline is pure tosh.  Aberystwyth University does not say anything about the Altar Stone -- as an institution it is gloriously unconcerned.  What has happened is that a couple of researchers linked to the university have published a paper, with colleagues, which may or may not be reliable.  I wish journalists would be more careful with their attributions.  As ever when this sort of situation arises, the real blame rests with the people who wrote and approved a press release which pretends there is certainty in a published paper which is in fact much more nuanced and hedged about with qualifications.  The paper does NOT say that the Altar Stone is not Welsh -- it says that MAYBE it has come from somewhere else.........

I have dealt with this paper here:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2023/09/when-is-bluestone-not-bluestone.html

The Stonehenge Altar Stone was probably not sourced from the Old Red Sandstone of the Anglo-Welsh Basin: Time to broaden our geographic and stratigraphic horizons?
by Richard E. Bevins, Nick J.G. Pearce, Rob A. Ixer, Duncan Pirrie, Sergio Ando, Stephen Hillier, Peter Turner, Matthew Power.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 51 (2023) 104215

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X23003905?via%3Dihub

(The paywall has now been removed, which is good news!)

What the authors actually say in the paper is that the Altar Stone was probably not derived from any of the Welsh ORS locations (or from other Devonian and Upper Silurian outcrops) that have been sampled.   Read that sentence again -- the key to everything is sampling density and methodology.  The geologists claim that the Altar Stone samples have higher Ba concentrations than the 58 ORS samples examined, but the Altar Stone samples have concentrations across a vast range (from below 1000 ppm to over 6000 ppm) and some of the ORS samples have Ba concentrations close to the Altar Stone mean of 2750 ppm.  In other words,  the evidence (from the examined samples) that the Altar Stone is "not from Wales" is very thin indeed, and it appears even thinner when one considers that sandstone outcrops from across thousands of sq km of "candidate territory" have not been examined at all by the geologists.........

Because of all of this, I am very surprised that Nick Pearce, one of the authors, has now gone on the record -- in the BBC article --  as saying: "The conclusions (sic) we've drawn from this is that the Altar Stone doesn't come from Wales."    A little more caution might have been a good idea -- and if a suggestion is ever to become something closer to a statement of fact, a great deal more fieldwork is needed in South Wales and the Borders.